


Far Too Simple

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [186]
Category: Sherlock Holmes (Downey films)
Genre: Curtain Fic, Domestic, F/M, First Kiss, First Time, M/M, Multi, Mutual Pining, Penetrative Sex, Pining, Polyamory Negotiations, Post-Game of Shadows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2018-11-09
Packaged: 2019-08-19 06:25:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16529171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: John, Sherlock, and Mary settle down in the country. There are growing pains.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Moving in together. Prompt from this [generator](http://colormayfade.tumblr.com/generator).

They buy a house near the sea. More of a cottage, really. But it has a large back garden and a fine view and enough room for three adults and a dog, so. It becomes home.

Not straight away, of course. There are growing pains.

For Holmes, the hardest thing to get used to is the quiet, all that damnable, silent green. The waves on the shore are one thing, but he misses the clatter of horses, the cries of the newsboys--even the song of the drunkards in the wee hours of dawn.

Well. Those he does some work to recreate, much to the Watsons’ chagrin.

For the doctor, it’s worry that crowds those earliest days: worry for his wife, stuck in the West Country with a man of whom she’s not particularly fond; worry for Holmes, to whom leisure has always been anathema, if not a trigger; and worry for him, jammed by choice between the two people on earth whom he loves the most, albeit in vastly different ways.

Well. Perhaps not so vast, some days.

There’s been more than one bleary morning when he’s gotten up grimly before dawn to wash and button on a fresh collar, a long list of house calls next to his bag in the front hall, and been haunted by dreams of Mary’s creamy shoulders, of the ragged scars on Holmes’ bare back, and found himself inconveniently distracted by thoughts of both: of how it felt to kiss Mary there as he peeled the wrapper from her body; of how it might feel to run his lips down the curve of Holmes’s spine. He’s gritted his teeth a few times and soldiered past it, that well of desire left open by sleep, but a few times--all right, thrice--he’s been late for his first appointment of the day, the tips of his ears still burning, praying the patient doesn’t comment on his flushed cheeks.

It’s an inconvenience, he tells himself, that’s all. A momentary lapse of his brain, fed by the still heady disbelief that his friend is _here_ , in one piece, and alive. There are moments over supper, over whist, over the green beans that Holmes is determined to coax up a lattice, when it’s all the doctor can do not to reach out, not to grab, not to touch; when he wants to shake the man and scream into his face, _You bastard, you’re alive. I saw you_ _die_ , and then kill any protest with a fierce, tender kiss and oh, gods be damned, Mary’s accommodating, but there’s no way in hell she wouldn’t toss him out for that. Having his recently ex-dead friend on site is one thing; snogging said friend into the soil, digging at his hips with earth-stained hands, is quite another.

Does he say this to Mary? No. Far too simple. Which is where her vexation lies.

That Sherlock needs John is apparent to anyone, frankly, with eyes. That said need stretches also to want is not difficult to spot, either, provided that one chooses to look.

And Mary does. Ever so carefully, natch.

It’s not as though one needs a microscope to see it, or any particular skill. So far as she’s known him, Sherlock’s never tried to hide it, how much he loves her husband; she’s not even sure if he can. It pours off of him in waves whenever John is about: when they’re in the kitchen washing up after supper, in the mornings when they linger on the porch with their tea, in the warm afternoons after John gets home from his rounds, rousting about in the garden with Gladstone and cheerfully calling each other names.

But it’s most acute in the evenings, when the brandy’s gone and cigars have been smoked and John’s hand has found its way into her hair, tugging at every pin he can reach. Then the look on Sherlock’s face would fill a hundred novels so naked is its appeal, so awash is it in pure, loving want. He wants John to touch him with such gentle possession, to smile into his eyes, at his sighs, and sweep him off with quiet fanfare to bed.

How John can fail to see it, she has no earthly idea.

For most women--most people, she supposes--the situation would be intolerable: living with a man underfoot who’s as eager for her husband as is she. Yet what drives Sherlock, she’s certain, is not jealousy; he has no desire, now, to break she and John apart. He’s as keenly aware of John’s happiness as she is and, oh, he’s so very happy these days; she’s never seen him so completely content. And she suspects Sherlock hasn’t either.

She feels no threat from him, strangely; more a sort of companionship, a sense of being comrades-in-arms. They both adore John, are both as keenly aware of his faults as of his virtues, and that sort of understanding, Mary’s found, goes a long way.

He’s a stubborn bastard, their John. So stubborn that he cannot admit what it’s plain to her that he wants.

Sometimes, at supper, she’ll catch him staring at Sherlock’s mouth while Sherlock is in the midst of a grand treatise on his latest obsession, botany or birds or bees. Not staring as a lip reader might but as a parched man might look upon water, as if there amongst his friend’s two-day beard he might fight sustenance at last. He looks at her like that sometimes in the privacy of their bedroom when she’s taking too long to undress, when he’s stiffening beneath the bedclothes and she’s still leisurely unlacing her stays. Sherlock will be prattling on about this discovery or that and she’ll want to reach over and shake John, squeeze him, say to him, _Go on, do it, he feels the same way_ , but she fears he’s as likely to turn about in horror as he would be to reach across the serving dishes and clutch the back of Sherlock’s neck and and stop up that rapid-fire mouth. Not horror at wanting--she knows him better than that--but horror at that want being seen, most especially by her.

Still, she figures after three months of this nonsense, if anything’s to be done, the initiative will have to be hers. Twenty years they’ve known each other, lived underfoot just as long, and yet it seems neither of them’s been brave enough to speak his piece. Well then. They’ll have a push.  


*****

 

“Darling,” she says one morning over jam and warm toast, “don’t forget I’m going into the city today.”

John hums into his coffee. “I’d not forgotten.”

“The city?” Holmes says brightly. “And pray tell, what drags you back to our fled metropolis?”

“A friend in need of solace and a sympathetic ear.”

“Ah.” He rattles the paper and sends her a hint of a smile. “Two things you offer skillfully, in my experience.”

She returns it. “So I do.”

“Madeline’s asked me to stay,” she tells John as he gathers his bag at the front door. “I think that’s perhaps best, don’t you? Rather than having to rush about this evening and making one of you come out to meet the train.”

John grumbles and reaches for her, tucks his beard against the curve of her neck. “It’s no bother, coming to get you.”

“Nonsense. You know I don’t like it when you drive in the dark. Or worse, when you let Sherlock drive.” He gives up a low groan, her husband, and she laughs, winds her arms around his back. “I know,” she says. “I know, it was just the once. But that was quite enough, don’t you think?”

“It’s not him I’m worried about.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Mmmm.” John’s mouth turns insouciant, his tongue touching her skin. “Certainly not. What shall I do for a whole night without you?”

She bites back a grin. “I’m certain you’ll figure out something.”

A brush of teeth. “Is this not akin to abandoning your wifely duties? I’m fairly sure that it is.”

She cups his face in her hands and kisses him. “I’ll be on the eleven o’clock train tomorrow morning, all right?”

“No,” he murmurs, “not all right. I'll miss you terribly.” He slips a hand to her breast and squeezes, chuckles when she ghosts out a gasp. “And the bed will be ever so cold.”

“That’s what hot water bottles are for, my darling. Now go on. You’re going to be late.”

 

*****

 

Holmes stands in the garden after breakfast, munching on a handful of snap peas and puzzling over his recalcitrant lettuce which, despite his best efforts, is refusing to truly take root.

His greatest lesson in semi-retirement so far is this: plants are not people. People are quantifiable, understandable, even in their darkest of moods. Plants, on the other hand, despite being the subject of hundreds if not thousands of years of thoughtful observation, seem to delight in inexplicable behavior. Were he of a different mind, he might wonder if it was deliberate, tiny acts of free will designed to thwart man’s attempts to master them, these green fingers of dirt and seedling and rain.

Take the lettuce, for instance: he has followed every rule, every line found in all his farming books--some older even than this house--and still the lettuce thumbs its proverbial nose at him, apparently more content to sleep beneath the surface of the earth than to rise above it to greet the life-giving sun.

“Sherlock?” Mary says, a few steps from his back. “Do you have a moment?”

“A moment, yes. I was just explaining to Gladstone some of the strange injustices of gardening.”

“Were you? Did he have any suggestions?”

“We’d not yet reached the question and answer portion, no.”

“Ah,” she says, her amusement apparent. “Well, I’m sure you’ll find him of great insight.”

“He just ate a toad,” Holmes says, staring down at the bulbous beast. “And half a rotten apple. So whatever he’s full of, he won’t be for long.”

Mary touches his arm; well, the rolled sleeve of his shirt, really. Still, it’s a bit of a shock; it's the first time, to the best of his recollection, she’s ever touched him at all.

“I’ve decided to stay in the city tonight,” she says. “London, I mean.”

“What other city is there, dear girl?”

“Indeed.” Her hand has not moved. Is it his imagination, or has it grown heavier? “May I ask you a favor? Something I’d like you to do in my absence?”

“Certainly.”

Her eyes are firm on his, rather more blinding, indeed, than the sun. “I need you to kiss John.”

“You--you what?”

“I know how you feel about him, Sherlock. And I know that you have, for whatever reason, tried to swallow that feeling for many years, but those feelings have not gone away.”

There’s a rabbit in his chest suddenly, an ancient and very wise desire to flee. “No, my dear, no, I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood. John and I are merely--”

“John loves you, too.”

His veins are ice water, his blood colder than any Swiss waterfall. “Mary, please.”

“He _does_.” She shakes him a little, her rings cutting through his shirt and into his flesh. “Lord, the two of you. You deserve each other some days, I think.”

He looks into her face expecting to see anger or disgust; pain, perhaps, or fear. Instead, to his great shock, what he finds is compassion.

“If I didn’t understand it, I never would have married him,” she says, softer now. “But I do, so much as I can. I thought that being under one roof would be enough, but now I see that it is not. For either of you, Sherlock. You both want more.”

“He is married to you, madam,” Holmes says, his voice a pinecone in his throat. “Before the law and God, that must be enough.”

Mary lifts her hand to his cheek. Not the touch of a lover, but that of a friend. “Nonsense,” she says. “Dare I say: poppycock. Do this for me tonight, Sherlock. Kiss him when the shadows grow long and know that you have my blessing. Allow the evening to unfold as it will. And when I return home tomorrow, we’ll do our best, you and me, to sort it all out.”

He wants to say yes so badly. Wants to nod and play out an acquiesce and spend the day dreaming without guilt of the sounds the doctor might make when their mouths meet, the sounds that drift to his ears each night from the other side of the house.

“Sherlock,” Mary says again, and there is something undeniably disarming about the way she says his name. “Please.”

He takes a breath, shakier than he might have liked, and clutches at her slim, sun-warmed wrist. “Are you certain?”

Her pulse is a butterfly under his thumb, wings beating quick in the wind. “Surely you know me well enough now to answer that.”

“Yes, I suppose I do. Yes.”

She raises herself a little and brushes her lips against his unshaven cheek. “Good,” she says. “Now go and put on some shoes. You’re driving me to the depot to meet the train.”

At the depot, he says: “Is there really a friend who’s in need?”

Mary slips down from the wagon and smiles at him, squinting up at him in the heat. “Of course there is, Sherlock,” she says. “There’s you.”


	2. Chapter 2

When the doctor arrives home at half-past seven, far later than he’d meant to, the blaze of the day has faded. He pushes through the front door with his coat on his arm, a thin sheen of sweat beading over his neck and clouding the skin on his face. He needs a wash desperately, a bucket of cold water and some rosewater soap; a good meal and then some kind hours of sleep. Too many calls today, too much glad-handing. Maybe, he thinks with a stretch, wincing as his stiff knee starts to bark, Mary’s picked a fine night to be gone. He’ll be of no use to anyone on this evening.

“Holmes?” he calls. “Are you here?”

A vague sort of sound comes from the kitchen. “No need to ask the same question of you,” Holmes calls. “You’re quite pungent, you know.”

“I am aware.”

Holmes’s head appears around the door jam. “Then for the love of god, please clean yourself, doctor. I’m not sitting down to supper with you smelling like that.”

“Says the man who bathed in camphor for a month!”

“That was an experiment!”

“No, that was torture. For everyone, I suppose, except you. We had complaints from the neighbors, do you remember?”

A flit of a smile. “I remember, yes. You talked them out of calling the police.”

“I bribed them,” the doctor corrects, tugging at the laces of his boots. “With your half of the next month’s rent, as I recall.”

“Well, you’ve no such excuse as science for smelling like a monkey.”

“Don’t I? What do you suppose I’ve been doing all day? Gallivanting in the sunshine for fun?”

“Tsk. You are tired, aren’t you?” Holmes says primly. “You do get short when your bones are weary. Mary and I have discussed it several times.”

“Oh, have you now?”

“Yes. Now shoo. There’s a fresh pitcher in your bedroom. And some semi-decent soap, I should think.”

“There’s what?” The doctor comes up short, his stocking feet skidding a bit on the floor. “I say. Did you lay that out for me, Holmes?”

“I asked Gladstone to do it, but he was rather rude in his refusal.”

A warm feeling spreads through him that has naught to do with the heat. “Did Mary tell you to do that?”

Holmes’ cheeks turn delightfully pink. “She, ah--not in so many words.”

“Well then,” the doctor says, amused, “perhaps we’ll make a fine wife out of you yet, old boy.”

When he comes to the table freshly scrubbed, Holmes is still flushed, as if he’s stuck his head too close to the fire. Except there is no fire tonight, only a cold supper laid out beneath a confident candle, its flame twisting jauntily in the draft from the open window. A supper that Holmes, the doctor notices rather belatedly, when his own plate is nearly scraped clean, can’t be bothered to touch.

“Aren’t you hungry?”

“It’s too hot to eat.”

“Which is why you’re smoking, obviously. To ward off the heat.”

He expects a comeback from Holmes, a snapshot bon mot. But his friend says nothing. Reaches instead for a match and a fresh cigarette with fingers that, in the shadows of the candle, appear almost to shake. Almost like the man was nervous, as if he’s holding himself on an edge.

“Holmes?”

“Hmm?”

“Are you all right?”

“Why do you ask?"

“You seem...very ill-ease.”

“Do I?”

“Yes.” The doctor sets down his fork, swallows the last of his buttered bread. “You do indeed.”

And it is at that moment that Holmes’s carefully-laid plans go awry.

The order of the evening was to be this:

  1. See to it that Watson was refreshed, washed clean of the stress of the day.
  2. Offer sustenance and good company. Give no hint that this evening, aside from the absence of the good Mrs. Watson, would offer anything other than the ordinary.
  3. Brandy by the open windows in the parlor. Brief discussion, as needed, of anything of note that had occurred during the day.
  4. Place hand on Watson’s knee. Make concise declaration of affection. Clearly state intention.
  5. If acquiescence is received, pitch forward and press mouth to Watson’s. As needed, employ tongue.



And scene.

But what Holmes had not anticipated and now could not control was his fear.

What if Watson rejected him, shoved him to the floor and ran for the not-at-all metaphorical hills? Or what if he thought Holmes was joking? Oh gods, what if he took the whole thing as a great joke? What if he laughed when Holmes touched his face, when he at last said what his blasted heart had waited twenty-odd years to express?

What if he stared at Holmes coldly and told him that he was wrong, that he, the great bloody detective, had misunderstood every word and every gesture for the past twenty years?

What if he sent Holmes away?

At a simmer these thoughts were, all the hours of that long, lovely day, but when he’d seen Watson standing in the front hall, covered in dust and at least six different kinds of pollen and smelling of exertion, of sweat and strain, they’d been kicked to a boil, one only exacerbated by the basest, most delicious sort of want.

John looked liked he’d been working hard, had pushed his body to the limit and back, and oh, how Holmes was sure that he could make Watson look exactly like that given a few hours, the application of certain oils, and a big empty bed.

It took so much effort then to wait in the kitchen, to not stride down the hall and throw open the bedroom door and wrest the sponge away from Watson and spread his fingers over soapy skin and say unguarded things he desperately meant that when the doctor did come to table, smelling sweet now, scrubbed fresh, there was naught Holmes could do but suck in smoke and cling hard to the threads of his plan.

And then Watson says: “You seem...very ill-ease.”

Holmes sticks a new cigarette between his teeth. Can’t remember how to light the damn thing. “Ah. Do I?”

“Yes. You do indeed.” The doctor leans forward, the western sky behind his head crowning him in a halo of light. “Are you sure that you’re well?”

There is a sound, one that Holmes will only hear later, one that only later can he understand came from him. In the moment, what he knows is the scrape of his chair, the tumble of the cig from his lips, the very startled expression on Watson’s face when Holmes’s hands cup it, the sweet cream smell of the doctor’s breath.

And then their mouths are joined at a rough and awkward angle, Watson half-twisted towards him, Holmes half-tumbled into his lap, and Holmes’s heart is a hammer, one banging certain on _this is a terrible mistake_ until the moment when Watson’s hands find his hips, certain, and squeeze.

All at once, the kiss is Watson’s and Holmes is falling, following, leaning into Watson’s mouth, the play of his fingers, the confident sweep of his tongue, and vaguely, he’s aware of being manhandled, of being pulled bodily astride Watson’s thighs, of the soft little growl that accompanies every kiss.

He is weak, he is water, he is drowning in pounding waves and he’s aroused, god help him, shamelessly hitching himself against Watson’s body, his back banging against the table, the state of the supper dishes be damned.

It’s Watson who stops them, Watson who gets a fist in his shirt and pulls back. Hisses. “You kissed me, you bastard.”

Holmes opens his eyes and tips their foreheads together. “I did.”

“What on earth made you do such a thing?”

“Are you complaining?”

A chuckle, damp and soft across his chin. “No, Holmes. God, no. I’m just a little confused.”

“Ah, well. Your wife made me.”

“My wife,” the doctor says, incredulous. “My wife made you kiss me.”

“Well, she bade me to. Essentially the same thing.”

Watson lifts his head, stares wide into Holmes’s eyes. “She _bade_ you to?”

“Yes. Glad to see your hearing’s not affected by your--”

“She bade you to,” Watson says again.

“She did.” Holmes traces the line of the doctor’s bright cheek. “She said some other very interesting and dare I say telling things.”

“Did she? Like what?”

“In summary?”

“If you like.”

“She said that we’re both fools for not doing this a long time ago.”

A hint of that growl, a hitch. “I’d say that she’s right.”

“And she gave us our blessing to do what we would tonight and she and I would sort it out in the morning.”

Watson pitches in and nuzzles the base of Holmes’s throat, his tongue a hummingbird on hot skin. “You and she will sort it out? Don’t I get a say?”

“As I’ve said many times before, you have a very wise wife.”

“I’ve never heard you say that. Not once.”

“I have,” Holmes breathes, stroking his fingers through Watson’s hair, tipping his head back to get more of that glorious mouth. “You must not have been listening.”

They stagger, when the time comes, to Holmes’s bed, and if Watson laughs at the fact that it’s been made for the first time in months--the sheets pulled up neat only to be snatched and torn down--bare skin against skin makes forgiveness easy, as does the eager brush of his hand.

“Oh,” Watson hums in Holmes’s ear, “you like that, don’t you?”

“I like a hand on my cock, yes, indeed. What a novel reaction.”

“No, you like that it’s me touching you. That’s what’s got you dripping.”

Holmes shoves at him, a gesture thoroughly belied by the arch of his back, his hungry press into the doctor’s tight fist. “Are you always this chatty in bed, Watson?”

A cruel, perfect stroke, one that incites a great whine. “Not always. But often.” He kisses Sherlock’s cheek. “Mary likes it. Do you?”

“That depends, I suppose, on further exposure. I don’t have enough data as of yet.”

“Hmmm. That is a quandary.”

Holmes swallows, dry grass on dry land. “What do you, ah--what do you say to her, then?”

“I pet her where she’s softest and tell her what it feels like. How wet she is, just from my fingers.” He bites gently at Holmes’s throat. “How good I’m going to make her feel as I get her ready for my cock.”

His blood is electricity, every thought a raw spark. “Oh,” he manages. “I see.”

Watson’s voice is a feather, a flicker of flame. “Would you like my cock, Sherlock?”

“Not yet,” Holmes whispers, sandpaper, clutching at the doctor's shoulders. “Talk to me some more first.”


	3. Chapter 3

The doctor is kind enough to oblige. Though the eagerness to which to takes to the task makes the last vestiges of reason in Holmes think that the speech is as much for Watson’s benefit as his own.

“Shall I tell you what you look like, open for me like this?” the man murmurs once he’s driven Holmes incoherent, once the world has been boiled down to Watson’s mouth astride his and the stretch of those long, dexterous fingers. “If I didn’t know better, old boy, I’d say that you crave me. Look at the way that you pull me in.”

He withdraws until only the tips of his fingers remain and Holmes shouts, rucks his hips up in vain.

“Shhhh,” Watson chides with a chuckle. “You’ll scare the neighbors’ sheep.”

“I’m sure they’ve heard worse. Or they’re about to, if you don’t stop mucking about.”

“Oh, ho. Is that a threat?”

“Should it be? Would that set you to your task faster?”

The doctor kisses him. “I’d much prefer if you asked nicely. Can you do that for me, darling? Hmm?”

“I’m not sure what in this instance constitutes _nice_.”

“Really?” A broad thumb sweeps over the swell of his balls, a Gordian knot tugged ever tight. “No idea at all?”

“No, ah, Watson, I--”

Watson raises his head and looks down at his friend. He’s seen Holmes in a hundred guises, seen his face twisted in thought, in smug certainty, in fear. But this, this is an expression he’s never allowed himself to imagine: Sherlock overwhelmed by desire, drowning for once in the call of his body, the needs of his flesh, rather than in the ordered galaxy of his mind. There is sweat on his skin and his eyes are aflutter, as if they’re uncertain if it’s safer to see out or close. His cheeks are a deleterious rose and his lips are moving over sounds more fundamental than words, sounds that to the doctor’s ears are base and sweet.

He wants to hear Holmes say what he needs. He needs to know that he is what Sherlock wants. But what he sees as he peers down at the pillow is a man overwhelmed, a man long past sense. For now, the great detective has fled and a human being is Sherlock at last.

“It’s all right,” he says, slipping back inside, soft. “It’s all right, darling. Shhhh---I have you now.”

 

*****

  
Upon reflection, the rigors of the night seem to Holmes a glorious blur.

He recalls not so much the detail of each coupling, each great wave of orgasm, but the feelings: the confusion when Watson first took him, his body fighting what his mind his heart wanted. The gentle way that the doctor had kissed him then, braced over him, unmoving, until some of the strangeness had lifted and he was ready for Watson to begin. The sweetness that had bloomed in him when Watson told him to stroke his cock, to jerk himself in ragged approximation of the doctor’s firm, perfect thrusts.

“That feels,” he remembers gasping, the words like spun sugar, “that feels--oh, gods, John. You feel so good.”

The stutter in the doctor’s breathing then, the fierce ardor of his unsteady kiss, and the feeling, the feeling of great and perfect affection, an understanding that went beyond body and soul.

“May I spill in you? Please, Sherlock. Say that I can.”

“Yes,” Holmes had said once over the course of those hours, a dozen times, more. “ _Yes_.”

In the telling of it, though, he struggles to define the evening in so many words. Nor, he decides, does Mary wish to know of it all.

They sit together cross-legged on his favorite set of ocean-washed stones and he tells her about it, sketches their sanctioned infidelity in the shade of the afternoon sun. She seems amused by some of it--”He does rather rabbit on at such moments, doesn’t he? He does adore the sound of his own voice”--nonplussed by some bits and shocked, to Holmes’s great surprise, by none.

“So,” she says at last, flicking her fingers over the sand. “What shall we do with him, you and I?”

His eyes run to hers, startled, and she makes no effort to hide her smile.

“What, did you think I’d let you have him once and then never again?”

“Truly,” Holmes says, “I’ve done my best not to think about it.”

“I didn’t know you could do that. Stop yourself from thinking, I mean.”

“Usually it requires some...external assistance.” He shifts a bit. “Of which my choices are limited here. I had to rely solely on willpower, I’m afraid.”

“And how has that been?”

Holmes’ mouth does an unsteady twist. “A challenge, dear lady. And a fierce one.”

He seems so frail sitting there, the air full of the rush of the sea, that she has the odd desire to embrace him, stroke his hair and whisper reassuring words into the thin curve of his ear. He has been battered by love before, this one, and despite the ardor of the night before, the culmination of the past twenty years, he’s afraid; made even more so, perhaps, because the potential for happiness, however unorthodox, sits so close within reach.

Mary knows this feeling well. Has felt it in some form since the first night she met John at a supper party: the spare man seated kindly next to the unofficial widow.

“We’re the leftovers, you and me, Miss Morstan, aren’t we?” he’d said with a chuckle. “All these fine married people at this table, and us.”

She’d looked into his face, not sure if he was teasing, and had seen, in fact, that he was. But only just. He’d had such kind eyes, she remembered; kind eyes and a warm, generous laugh that had made her feel at ease all throughout that first evening, that she’d missed when the gentlemen retired for brandy and cigars, feeling in the gaggle of ladies once again adrift.

And then a servant had come to her side and handed over a note. _Deadly boring, this lot_ , it read. _All these upstanding. Got used to being on an island with you. May I see you home?_

He hadn’t kissed her that first night, her doctor; nor the second. Nor the third. But in the hansom cab after their fourth evening together, he’d cupped her face in his hand and said her name very softly and it was she who’d kissed him, his lips hot and dry, his tongue startled when it met hers.

“My, my, Miss Morstan,” he’d murmured, his smile quite a mile wide, his moustache tickling her skin. “Do that again.”

A whirlwind after that, a few months of courtship, and then, to her great joy, a ring.

Holmes had of course, by his design, managed to complicate matters; never might she have imagined, that first night, that she’d come to know crime, that she’d see John cut to pieces, that she would come to be a heroine in a detective novel come to life. Nor could she have known that a man she’d found so odious at first brush might have become so important to her; so much so that she had upended what should’ve been a _de rigueur_ married life for life in the country sharing her husband with another man.

But now, sitting by the sea with Sherlock Holmes, his heart spilled out uncertain on weather-beaten stones, there is, she thinks, no better or more beautiful way.

Mary reaches for Sherlock’s hand. Squeezes it when he startles.

“I have some thoughts on this matter,” she says. “A few ideas on how we might navigate this rather unique circumstance. Would you care to hear them?”

He turns his wrist and their palms meet; their eyes, too. A handshake of sorts between friends.

“Nothing, dear lady, would please me more.” A quirk of an eyebrow. “In this particular moment, at least.”


	4. Chapter 4

That something has been decided in his absence is evident the moment Watson steps through the back gate. They’re waiting for him, both of them, his lovely wife and his oft-disheveled best friend, sitting side by side on the garden bench and how they knew he’d come in through the back rather than his usual stomp through the front door he does not know except that there’s no question that both, on occasion, have been known to read his mind.

“John,” Mary says, smiling at him from the shade.

“Watson,” Holmes says with a nod.

“Hello,” the doctor says, skidding to a standstill in front of them. “I, ah--yes. Hello, you two.”

So caught up was his mind in the events of the day--the baby soon to be born in the village, the worrying cough of the farmer two valleys over, the broken arm of their neighbor’s apprentice--that it takes him a moment to remember that this tableau should probably unsettle him: his lover seated so calmly next to his wife, each looking up at him with deceptively placid expressions that he knows all too well disguise mental machinations, if not outright guile.

Mary is the first to rise, the first to touch his arm and lean her face up for a kiss. “Welcome home, dearest,” she says.

He clasps an arm around her waist and kisses her again. “And to you. How was London?”

“Noisy. Lively.” Her eyes crinkle with amusement. “I hear your evening was, too.”

Watson’s face rucks up towards crimson. “Good lord.”

“Indeed,” Holmes says, materializing at his other side, fingers prying at his and tugging the bag from his grip. “There was more than one occasion during our assignation when you took the Lord’s name in vain.”

“Assignation?!” Watson splutters, but the sound is lost utterly in the unexpected flush of Holmes’s mouth pressed to his.

There’s a moment in his mind of hesitation, of marital fear, but then Mary sighs against his neck and nuzzles his throat and Sherlock’s tongue slips to meet his and in John Watson something unknots, a cat’s cradle of love unlacing, and he holds his wife tight as he embraces his very best friend.

“We had a whole speech prepared,” Mary says in his ear, her nails catching his shirtfront. “It was quite thoughtful in its evidence and tone.”

Holmes nips at his lip and slides a hand beneath his coat. “Mmmm. It was extremely persuasive, don’t you think, Mary?”

“Oh,” his wife murmurs against his mouth. “Oh, yes.”

“But I think,” Holmes says reasonably, as if the both of them were not petting the doctor in public, in full view of the sheep on the hill, of anyone who might pass by, “I think, my dear, this solution may be far more effective if only for its kairotic vigor. What say you?”

“I think,” Watson says, hoarse, “that I should prefer to see to this matter inside. Preferably with far fewer clothes.”

They laugh at him, Sherlock and Mary, smirk each against his skin.

“He does lose all sense of propriety when he’s aroused,” Holmes says. “You’re quite right. I hadn’t noticed.”

“Well,” Mary says, “I’ve had more opportunity to observe him thus, that’s all.”

“Stop talking about me as if I’m not here.”

“And why should we want to do that?” Holmes says, “when it has such a pleasing effect?”

Slim fingers and blunt tangle over his trousers, pet together at the swell of him there, and Watson swears, clutches madly at them both.

“ _Inside_ ,” he hisses. “For the love of--”

Then there are hands on his hips, pulling, fists caught in the tails of his coat, and he abandons his bag to the afternoon air and lets himself flow along with the tide.

 

*****

 

They hadn’t talked about this.

For they’d tossed about between them over the long hours of the day, how they might take John to bed together they had not discussed.

Instead, the arrangement they’d settled on--the simplest and most logical one--was for the good doctor to drift between their beds in some to-be-determined pattern of mutual convenience. Both had rejected the notion of a calendar or any sort of arbitrary assignment of particular days in one dock and other spent on the opposite shore.

“That would seem the easiest solution,” Holmes had said, stretching his bare feet towards the sea. “To take the matter out of our two hands and press it instead into some pre-formed mold.”

Mary hadn’t answered right away. She’d tipped her face towards the sun and given herself over to thought. It was a quality about her that Holmes had come to appreciate: her deliberativeness, the careful way in which she approached things. For some, that sort of care was a stand-in for uncertainty, or an unwillingness to decide. In Mary, it was neither. Like he, she knew her own mind and understood that there were times when she needed to give it some breathing room to work.

At last, she’d said: “Simplest in this situation would not, I think, be for the best. For all our desire not to see it as such, this is a most remarkable thing, that which we are contemplating.” She turned to face him, her light eyes catching the waves. “We’d be better served by taking these decisions each day, as they come.”

“It will be messy.”

“No doubt. We shall both have our feelings bruised, at one time or another.”

“And John. This may be difficult for him. He is, despite my best efforts--and, my dear, I’m beginning to think, yours--rather conventional, in his heart of hearts.”

She’d reached out and tapped the back of his hand, allowed her fingers to rest. “I think he’ll find our arguments persuasive. Once we lay the matter out for him, I don’t forsee any way that he’ll refuse. Do you?”

“We will be,” Holmes had said lightly, a bubble of warm air in his chest, “a difficult duo to resist.”

Their plan had been one based in discussion: a cool drink in the shade and a long, thoughtful dip into reason. But then Mary had kissed Watson, as a wife should do, and Holmes had felt an itch his bones, a soft ache he could now acknowledge as want, and it had seemed reasonable to rise and press himself to John’s side and take up a kiss of his own.

It had not occurred to him that matters might so quickly accelerate.

To wit:

Watson is naked, stripped down past his socks and stretched out on his side with Holmes wound behind him, his chest braced to Watson’s back, his mouth gamboling pleasantly across the doctor’s shoulders as they watch Mary undress.

The pins in her hair first, then her stays and her basque. Her breasts spill free beneath her linen underclothes and she works free of her stockings and the sound Watson makes when the last layer is lifted makes Holmes moan into his flesh.

She is lovely, Watson’s wife. Of that there can be no question. He’s never thought of her in this way, he realizes curiously. As a woman. First she was a rival, then she was a wife, and there’s been no room in his assessment, his careful categorization, for him to see her as an object of desire; but then, so few, man or woman, have ever stirred him thus.

“Darling,” Watson says, palm outstretched. “Come here.”

Her eyes find Sherlock’s and she marvels at the fire there, the unsettled bloom of new stars. She has never looked at him and seen beauty but now, with her husband in his arms, with John’s cock preening under the tips of Sherlock’s fingers, he looks like a sleeper awakened, a man at long last ready for the pleasures of life outside of the dreamy, vicious circles of his own mind.

She sinks a knee onto the bed, the sheets cut through with the slow, evening sun, and eases into Watson’s embrace.

“Oh,” he groans as her breasts catch his chest, as she curls a hand up and into his hair. “Oh my god.”

“Please,” Holmes rumbles, “no such formality is necessary. We’ll answer to Mary or Sherlock.”

John’s hips kick and Sherlock’s knuckles brush her stomach, wound as they are now around the hot line of her husband’s shaft, and she laughs, turns John’s head so she can lick at his mouth

“I think we should put you on your back so we can both please you,” she says.

Sherlock kisses John’s neck and John arches back with a sigh, his hands going tight on Mary’s waist.

“And,” Holmes says, low and impossibly sweet, “so we can see what you look like when we do.”

When they roll him, his thighs fall open, his arms do, and they wind together, their mouth crashing over his like moon-whipped waves on a beach, tugging him first this way and that, trading kisses until the taste of tobacco mingles with mint, with a strong cup of tea with cream, and she’s vaguely aware that she’s moving against him, rubbing the wet mound of her sex against his thigh, little sounds punched out and dripping into their kiss.

“My god, man,” Holmes pants, “see to the needs of your wife.”

John makes an incoherent sound, gravel pitched over a hot road, and the next thing she knows, she’s astride her husband’s thigh, his arm spread across her back, his gorgeous mouth lapping greedily at her nipples, closing teeth and sucking glorious, hard. She keens and plants a hand on his chest, a much-needed anchor--and feels, to her great surprise,  Holmes’s lips on her wrist, the soft nuzzle of his nose on its underside.

Then the bed shifts and Holmes’s lips are at her ear--“Hold him steady, dear girl. Nice and steady”--and then her husband, her kind and usually decorous husband, is moaning between her breasts like a beast.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An utterly self-indulgent expansion of this chapter because its shorthanded nature has continued to niggle at me.

“Fuck,” John cries out, “ _fuck_ ,” and it’s only when she feels the brush of Holmes’s hair against her thigh that she understands what he’s doing, and the sight of it, oh, the sight. It makes heat rush to the tips of her ears. It makes an ember sing at her center and she can’t help but cry out, too, at the sight of Sherlock’s mouth on her husband’s straining cock.

She’s read about such things, heard it whispered of with some horror among the more loose-lipped of her married friends. But she’s never witnessed it before, this particular act, certainly never performed it; in all the months they’ve been wed, the thought to her had never occurred. Nor has John mentioned it or given any sign that it was something he desired. And yet now, feeling him writhe beneath her, there can be no question as to how much pleasure the act brings him; that he claws at her back with the same urgency that he clutches at Sherlock’s hair leaves little doubt.

And it is a sign of her madness, the way she has been carried so far from the shore of good sense, that as she watches her husband thrust into another man’s mouth, what she wonders is: what does John taste like, just there?

What might it be like to hold him like that, the weight of him sunk onto her tongue?

*****

Watson, Holmes thinks, struggling to keep the man’s hips pinned to the bed, is a mess. Even with his wife half-astride him, the doctor is kicking like a damnable horse. Each stroke of Holmes’s tongue seems to surprise him, every gentle spear beneath his foreskin and loving turn over the head; it’s as if, Holmes thinks, no one has ever done this for him before, as if here, in his most vulnerable of places, he’s not before known the pleasure of parted lips.

Can that be so?

That Mary had not kissed Watson thus, he had taken as a matter of course; this was not an act, in his experience, in which ladies engaged. But the notion that no one--in school, in the barracks, in the lonely wilds of India--had sucked John Watson’s cock had not factored into his split-second equation. But then, watching man and wife move together had, to his great surprise, aroused him: John’s tanned hands upon Mary’s pale skin; the hot little grunts he made as he licked at her breasts; the smell of her arousal, the sound of it as she worked herself against John’s body, a hint of that soft, honey clench. And so his decision to slide down and devote his attention to Watson’s ample cock had been less reason and more instinct than he might have hoped.

Watson’s nails scrape his neck and force his head down and now it’s he whose hips are a commotion, he who’s thrusting into the bedclothes like a desperate schoolboy and groaning to beat the band.

“Sherlock,” he hears Watson hiss. “Oh, dear god. What are you doing to me? What are you--?”

“You know very well what he’s doing, darling,” Holmes hears Mary say. “He’s going to make you come.”

The doctor makes a piteous noise and his whole body bows, trying to shove more of himself in Holmes’s mouth as fast as he can, and it’s only then that Holmes can hear reason, can give one last hungry suck and tug himself free of Watson’s grasp.

“Now, my dear,” he rasps, his eyes finding Mary’s, his fingers brushing her hip, “come here and take what is yours.”

Later, he will feel a flicker of guilt for not ensuring that she was ready, that John’s kisses and his hands upon her flesh had had a sufficient effect. But in the moment, in the Watsons' broad bed, it doesn’t occur to him to ask--or even, if he’d dared it, to touch--and truth be told, there is no hesitation in her when she moves, slides down and straddles John’s hips, reaches with a fist for his cock.

And Sherlock? He shimmies up the doctor’s side and presses him into the pillows, kisses him while Mary takes him in inch by inch, and when she is fully seated, it’s Watson who wails, Watson who reaches for them, Watson who calls out their names.

“Please,” John whispers through a beautiful smile. “Oh, fuck, Sherlock. Mary, my darling. Please.”

Soon, the doctor can form no more words, so far into happiness is he. Soon, Mary is gasping, the breath driven out of her by each eager arch of her husband’s hips, and she’s clutching Holmes’s hand, their fingers wound tightly as Holmes laps the whines from Watson’s wide, willing mouth, his own split in a grin a country mile wide. Sherlock’s every sense is overblown and overwhelmed and it is utterly delicious, driving Watson towards madness in this way, feeling Mary’s nails dig into his skin as the doctor drives into her flesh and when Watson spills in her, stills, pressed within her deep and unrelenting, his pleasure is silent while she--oh, she--groans in a slow, ancient way that stirs his own cock and for a mad moment, he can see himself sitting up and lifting her free and sinking inside her sweetness himself, brushing her pale hair from her face as he drives in, rutting as the smell of Watson’s seed seeps up from the sheets and buries itself in his mouth.

For a moment, this is all that he wants, all he can imagine. All his great, busy mind can see.

But then Mary murmurs his name and squeezes his hand and his fantasy is easy to abandon, for once, in favor of reality. He pitches up and kisses the turn of her shoulder, nuzzles the sweat there, the heat.

“Would you help me?” she says. “He gets rather like an octopus when he’s been satisfied.”

“Does he now?”

“Mmmm.” She leans her cheek against his crown. “Sometimes he’s roused again before I can set myself free.”

“Well,” Holmes says, though this strikes him as rather the opposite of a problem. “We can’t have that, can we?”

Together, they extract her from Watson’s fevered grip--the doctor’s feeble-voiced protest be damned--and settle her into the fevered (and indeed cephalopod-like) ardor of her husband’s embrace. 

“Oh my darling,” Watson mutters, clutching her close. “You are the living divine.”

Holmes lays himself a discreet distance away and watches Watson’s nimble fingers play clumsy as they climb through Mary’s hair and tumble over the pale skin of her back--an act which seems strangely more intimate, even, than their union, the happy meeting of flesh upon flesh, for here, in the stumbling slowness of the doctor’s touch, the tremble that lies between Mary’s shoulders, their relations, their abiding affection, seems laid utterly bare.

“Should I leave you?” he says after a time, as the world around them grows drowsy, as the dips in John’s breathing grow slower and deep. “I don’t want to overstay my welcome.”

Mary reaches back and grabs at his thigh. “Don’t be daft,” she says. “Come here.”

Much to her surprise, he gives no protest but comes to curl against her, his body warm, his breath quick at the nape of her neck; his arms, though, stiff at his sides.

She laughs, leans her head back, lays her tangled hair on his chest. “You can touch me, you know. I don’t bite.”

“Don’t you?” he says at her temple, bravado tempered by a tentative smile. “How disappointing.”

“I say,” John says, back from the living dead, “Holmes, are you flirting with my wife?”

“No. Quite the opposite. Your wife is flirting with me. And why shouldn’t she? You practically abandoned her, old boy.”

John shifts and kisses her, a sensation made even more pleasant by the concomitant hum Sherlock rubs against her throat. “Then,” he rumbles, all saucy grin, “I shall have to give you a reason to return to me, shan’t I, Mrs. Watson?”

He strokes her slowly with careful fingers, his eyes locked on her face, and she is too far gone to hide anything, to deprive him of a single, needy sigh.

“You’re so very wet, my love,” John whispers. “So wet for us, aren’t you? Mmmm. And such a mess.” 

Holmes cradles her in the bow of his body as John pets at her, his arm balanced on the peak of her hip, but he doesn’t touch her, doesn’t smooth even his palms over the damp slide of her skin. She can feel the heat of him against her, the stiff, trembling strain; can feel the way that he’s panting, his heart pounding, it seems, to keep time with hers.

“Dear god,” he husband says as he parts her at last, presses the tips of two fingers in. “You’re ready to come, aren’t you, darling? You should see how flushed you are here. A rosebud ready to bloom.”

Sherlock’s whiskers scratch her cheek, a pleasant scrape that makes every spear of John’s fingers that much more electric and were she not a slave to her body, if she were still able to give herself voice, she would be begging for him to kiss her, to turn that shaggy face until their mouths met, until she could sink her tongue between those clever lips and come from her beloved husband’s touch.

When she finds climax, she shudders in slow, fevered waves, her lips moving over Holmes’s cheek, and he dares at last to lay a hand on her side, to stroke the gentle swell of her flesh as her lungs open and flutter and close.

“Oh, god,” Watson says, a slave and smitten. “To see you touching her.” He touches Holmes’s face, damp, lets him taste the smell of the sea. “You are beautiful together, my dear friend, you and she.”

It seems to Holmes then that time melts, that the minutes meld one into the other until he is pressed between them, Watson’s grin at his ear as he fists Holmes’s cock, Mary laying at his other side, her head propped on her hand, his arm curved around the soft bow of her back as his hips leap to meet the doctor’s clever grip.

“Come on, old boy,” Watson says. “Give it up.”

Mary scratches at his chest hair, her breasts plump and soft against his side, her expression wicked and yet somehow quite fond. “You know how he is, Sherlock. There’s no use resisting him. He’ll keep at you and at you until you do.”

But it’s not until they both kiss him, dip their heads over his hot face and trace their tongues over his that he seizes, every nerve in his body overloaded, at least drawn perfectly up, and he spurts between Watson’s fingers, gives himself over to a window-rattling cry. It is if the very air flies apart around him, as if the pale light of evening ratchets to a ruby-red glow; the world around him seems, for that beautiful instant, dipped in rich color--a life spent in shadow gone suddenly, dazzlingly bright.

“Is he always so eager?” Mary asks, her thumb turning gently through the wet, a sensation that brings his hips up again, 

Watson chuckles, leans the sound against Holmes’s jaw. Replaces it with a kiss. “I don’t know, dear. I don’t have enough data as of yet.”

This is madness, Holmes thinks, his breath staggering, his head spinning, his heart a glorified bloody mess. The very definition of insanity, laying in carnal embrace with his best friend in all the world--the man that he loves--and his wife. And yet, each of the players is smiling, each is holding him close; each is petting him as he drifts down from the heights, their fingers tangled where they brush on his flesh.

“This is madness,” he says, somehow, pushing the words rough from his throat.

“Is it?” Watson says. “Well. We don’t have to worry about that right now, do we? Come here, Holmes. Let me be greedy and have you both next to me, in case I should wake up in the night and think this was all some kind of beautiful dream.”

That Sherlock Holmes falls asleep in a heap is not all that surprising, given the evening he’s had. That he wakes up in a similar state, still entwined with the Watsons, still full of a soft, treacle sort of contentment--that is.

He sits up with a start, or tries to; too firm, however, is Watson’s grip on him for that.

“Sherlock,” Mary hums, her fingers curled around his wrist.“It’s early yet, hmm?”

He turns his hand and squeezes her fingers and thinks fleetingly of a half dozen bon mots before she brings his hand to her lips and stops them all with a kiss in his palm.

“Be still,” she says softly, pitching her voice over her husband’s gentle snores. “It’s all right. Go back to sleep.”

And what is there for him to do, the great detective, but to sink back with a sigh and curl into the eager clutch of John’s arm and give himself over, as Mary commands, to his dreams.   
  



End file.
